To sleep and be aware that you are sleeping, moreover, to manage the events of sleep, realize the most daring dreams in it, see incredible worlds, gain an out-of-body experience, go to the astral plane … What adepts of lucid dreams do not promise us. What is this phenomenon, is it beneficial or harmful? The opinions of experts turned out to be exactly the opposite.
According
Alexander Mironov, psychologist, neurophysiologist, researcher of lucid dreams:
Lucid dreams allow you to see the work of consciousness, as it were, from the other side. After all, consciousness is usually correlated with wakefulness, the physiological signs of which are associated with maintaining muscle tone and orientation in space. There is nothing like this in a lucid dream, but at the same time, consciousness works approximately the same as in wakefulness. The picture of the brain is almost the same as during normal sleep. Somewhat more activation of the frontal lobes, those departments that are associated with self-control, action planning, that is, with purposeful behavior. Higher heart rate, which indicates the emotionality of such a dream.
I would not recommend lucid dreaming for people with cardiovascular disease. Also, do not do this for people with mental disorders. They can be useful for those who have neuroses or phobias.
I will give an example from my own experience. I have been very afraid of spiders since childhood. I eventually got fed up with it and in a lucid dream created a room filled with creepy spiders. I was very scared, but since I realized that I myself was simulating this picture, I was able to disidentify with this fear. Now I can pick up any spider without much emotion.
It is known that there are people who do not have REM sleep at all.
But the practical application of lucid dreams is difficult because teaching them requires serious effort and perseverance. Therefore, I consider unjustified fears that they can cause addiction: it is usually caused by something that does not require much work. It also seems to me an exaggerated concern that lucid dreaming is an inferior sleep and, therefore, there is a risk to health. If such dreams occurred during deep sleep, it would be harmful. But they happen during REM sleep. It is known that there are people who do not have this phase at all, and this does not prevent them from living a normal life. And even more so, modifying one episode of REM sleep out of five or six per night, and even once every few days, is unlikely to harm us.
Unfortunately, in Russia and the CIS countries people come to this practice through esoteric doctrines. It is clear that the promise of out-of-body experiences and astral travel is commercially more profitable. But as a result, many of us look at the scientific research on lucid dreaming with skepticism.
VS
Ivan Pigarev, Doctor of Biological Sciences, specialist in sleep physiology:
There can be no benefit from lucid dreaming, and it is absolutely pointless to engage in these practices. What are called lucid dreams are not dreams at all. Because the first condition of a dream is a disconnected consciousness and a lack of connection with the surrounding reality. If a person consciously controls what he sees, then this is not a dream, but a kind of vision. It is not clear why people began to talk about them only in recent decades, because they have always been with a person.
When people use devices that wake them up every time REM sleep occurs, they interrupt real sleep. If the active desire to wake up at the moment of the dream is fixed, then this can lead to the effect of the so-called fragmented sleep. A person will not have long uninterrupted sleep from falling asleep in the evening to waking up in the morning. Other disorders may also occur — a reduction in the total duration of sleep, the appearance of long wakings in the middle of the night. All this will affect physical health, especially the gastrointestinal system, which very quickly begins to suffer from sleep problems. The next step may be mental disorders.
I believe that dreams, even unconscious ones, have neither meaning nor purpose, this is a kind of “noise” that we have due to the fact that the brain is complex and does not always work perfectly. Ideally, we would have to sleep without dreams. Dreams are a pathology of sleep. The best thing is not to pay attention to them and, upon waking up, immediately forget.